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SHIFTED
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Through this, we witness a thug going every which way to find David and silence him, while David learns to live in poverty and finding ways to have food without paying, while earning himself a job. “Shifted” can never decide if it wants to be a tragic drama, dramedy, or pure thriller, so it pulls us every which way and feels scattered. One of the immense plot holes of “Shifted” involves the fact that the writers establish that David can only afford to live in a storage unit, can’t get a haircut, is looking for a job, looks through classifieds and discover the exact plot by fishing a newspaper out of the garbage, while befriending a man who is in his situation, and has to trick pizza places into giving them pizza without having to pay—and suddenly in the climax when David has to discover who is looking for him, his neighbor suddenly has a laptop, with full internet access. Huh? I recall sitting through the whole film, I’m confused as to why a man who is utterly destitute would suddenly have a laptop with internet access in a small storage unit with no windows. But beyond the massive plot hole, David is never as interesting a character as he should be because he has no personality or chemistry with anyone, thus he relinquishes most of the tension.
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When “Shifted” decides to stop being a thriller and focuses on our
character David’s attempts to adjust to poverty and his new friends, it
has the potential to be a really human drama that explores the life of
the poor and the impoverished. The scenes where David learns how to live
and get by through his two friends, are the most compelling to watch.
In spite of the inherent struggles behind the scenes in making
“Shifted”, the film itself never really manages to take off in terms of
interest and pure nuance. The story is one that pulls the audience all
over the place, and really never manages to find a point of focus from
which to bring us along with it. It begins as a story of a man who loses
his high paying job and now has to live on the streets surviving in the
outskirts in LA learning how the other half lives, and then it attempts
comedy on brief instances that never get off the ground. Finally, it
becomes a thriller in which the executives intend on finding the
character David because he may know some secrets that they don’t want
him to reveal.
For a mostly scattered film, “Shifted” occasionally presents some
interesting points when exploring David’s adjustment to poverty, but
beyond that, the writing really pulls the audience into all sorts of
themes and concept directions that never add up to a cohesive film.
